Stateville prison almost empty after state moves quickly to comply with court order

The state is on track to have moved all but a few inmates out of Stateville Correctional Center by a court-ordered deadline Monday, marking the end of an era for the dilapidated century-old facility and a moment of relief for some former inmates who say they are still haunted by memories of their time there.

For more than a month, the Illinois Department of Corrections has been transferring hundreds of Stateville inmates to prisons around Illinois, leaving the storied maximum security facility in Crest Hill, near Joliet, almost deserted.

A federal judge this summer ordered state prison officials to move most people incarcerated at Stateville by Sept. 30, after civil rights lawyers filed a lawsuit on behalf of inmates arguing conditions were hazardous for people housed there. The state did not contest the judge’s order, which came as Gov. JB Pritzker’s administration is moving forward with plans to rebuild both Stateville and Logan Correctional Center , a women’s prison in Lincoln that could be rebuilt on Stateville’s campus.

IDOC spokesperson Naomi Puzzello said Friday that all “general population” inmates have been transferred to other facilities. Inmates were expected to be spread out in minimum-, medium- and maximum-security facilities across the state. Puzello said factors, including programming, medical needs, staffing and security, were considered in the transfers.

“It’s not easy. It’s a relatively short period of time, but we do — because we have other corrections institutions in the state that have some space, we’re able to do it in the period that they’re asking us to,” Pritzker said at an unrelated event Wednesday.

A full complement of Stateville employees represented by American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31 are still reporting to work at the prison as the union bargains over the process for transferring the workers, AFSCME Council 31 spokesperson Anders Lindall said last week.

All Stateville staff will continue on with their “assigned duties” until the bargaining process is completed, Puzzello said, without providing additional details.

Stateville opened in 1925 and has an operational maximum capacity of more than 3,000 inmates, according to IDOC. It’s been home to some of Illinois’ most well-known convicted criminals, including Gangster Disciples founder Larry Hoover and mass killers such as Richard Speck. Before Illinois abolished the death penalty, it was for years the site of state executions, including that of serial killer John Wayne Gacy.

About two dozen people remained in a health care unit at Stateville as of Friday, Puzzello said. Those people “will be moved when we identify placements that will properly meet their medical needs,” she said.

Stateville housed 568 inmates in June, according to IDOC. The process of transferring them to other prisons began in August. State officials had never revealed a clear timeline for closing Stateville before U.S. District Judge Andrea Wood issued her order on the Sept. 30 dateline, although officials had signaled they were expecting to wind down operations as soon as this month.

The prison came under increased scrutiny this summer following the death of Michael Broadway, a 51-year-old who collapsed while incarcerated there during a heat wave in June. Broadway died due to asthma and heat stress , according to the Will County coroner’s office.

The proposal to dismantle Stateville and Logan and rebuild both facilities on the Stateville site was announced by Pritzker’s administration in spring. The project is expected to cost in the neighborhood of $1 billion and take three to five years. The state says the plan would save hundreds of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance costs.

Prison advocates and people who have been housed at Stateville had varied reactions to the demolition plan but generally celebrated the demise of a facility where former inmates described conditions as foul to the point of being traumatizing.

“Once they took the cuffs off and turned on the lights, I recognized that I was in another form of hell,” James Lenoir, who was incarcerated at Stateville for eight years ending in 2022, said in an interview last week.

There was feces, toilet paper and mold on the wall, and roaches below, he said. Lenoir was initially placed in F House, the prison’s infamous roundhouse, or panopticon. Critics of that building’s design — multiple floors of cells surrounding a central watchtower — said it fueled a cagelike and chaotic environment. It was thought to be the last remaining roundhouse in use in the U.S. before being shuttered in 2016.

But inmates dealt with poor conditions across the campus, Lenoir said.

Since coming back to Chicago on supervised release, Lenoir said he’s experienced symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder stemming from his time in prison — frequently checking for spider webs or holes in the wall where mice could come into his cell, and a lingering suspicion of vents or any place that could have something “crawl through it.”

Lenoir wanted to be at Stateville as opposed to a downstate prison because it was closer to family, his lawyer and educational opportunities including the Northwestern Prison Education Program, which allows some people incarcerated at Stateville to earn a Northwestern degree.

Since the state announced it would be rebuilding Stateville, some advocates for inmates and workers have raised concerns about the distance of facilities where incarcerated people could be transferred. For inmates from the Chicago area, being transferred to a facility downstate “would be a big problem,” Lenoir said.

But it would be worse to remain at Stateville, he said.

“I don’t know if that’s worth the risk (to stay in Stateville), because of the damage that has been done to me, on hindsight,” he said.

Jennifer Vollen-Katz, executive director of the prison watchdog group John Howard Association, said inmates who have been transferred out of Stateville have expressed everything from relief at getting away from the horrible conditions to disappointment at the lack of programs or sense of community at their new facilities.

Workers are also feeling uncertainty, Lindall of AFSCME said. Many live in Chicago or the south suburbs and are concerned about whether they’ll be offered alternative employment that is similar to their jobs at Stateville and not too distant from their homes, he said.

The Northern Reception and Classification Center and Minimum Security Units, located a short distance from Stateville’s maximum unit facility, will remain open.

IDOC has said it doesn’t anticipate anyone losing state employment as a result of the Stateville rebuild process. Lindall said the union remains skeptical because it has yet to see the state’s plan for Stateville employees.

The union is set to meet with management on Monday, Lindall said Wednesday.

The governor last week reiterated that his administration plans to rebuild both Stateville and Logan in three to five years.

“This is a system of correctional institutions that have been — I mean, they’re 70 to 100-plus years old and not really appropriate for modern-day rehabilitation, and that’s what we really want in a corrections system,” Pritzker said.

Renovating “would be cost-prohibitive and not allow for a structural redesign that would benefit our staff and individuals in custody,” according to IDOC.

Women incarcerated in Logan will remain there until a new facility is built, IDOC officials have said previously — a plan that Vollen-Katz said the John Howard Association does not support, given poor conditions at Logan as well.

A group of men who were previously students in the Northwestern Prison Education Program at Stateville questioned whether rebuilding a prison on the site remains necessary.

“They still got a whole bunch of prisons left, so they don’t need to rebuild nothing,” said Broderick Hollins Sr., who was incarcerated at Stateville until early 2022 and described it as “the nastiest place I’ve ever seen.”

“If you’re going to spend that type of money, you need to put it in communities,” he said.

James Soto, who was incarcerated for more than four decades after being wrongfully convicted, also questioned the need to rebuild Stateville. He acknowledged that while he initially celebrated hearing that Stateville would be emptied, he ultimately found it to be bittersweet.

“For a lack of a better comparison, that is where a lot of my growing up occurred, my maturity,” Soto said. “There’s not going to be any real archive or history of those moments in time, of the people and the relationships that you build there.”